Lean Engineering. Applying Lean Principles to Building Experiences

lean engineering
applying lean principles to building experiences
bill scott (@billwscott)
sr. director, user interface engineering, paypal

LEAN DAY UX
March. 1, 2013. NY

the way it was
how we used to engineer experiences

building
experiences
circa 1985
merry band of three.
dropped out of college for
semester. prototyped our
way to nirvana.

however...

had to roll your
own everything
(close your eyes & imagine)
no internet. no google. no
blogs. no email. no blogs. no
stackoverﬂow. no github. no
twitter.
much of the software era
has been about building
from scratch.
of course open source was
gaining momentum. unix.
gnu. linux. perl. mozilla.

disconnected
from experience
deliver to disk then to user

everything was focused on
getting it perfect for
stamping on the disk

no user in the loop.
experience happened
somewhere down the supply
chain

software had a
long shelf life
not dynamically updatable

designed for longevity

herculean effort to deliver

engineers ran the asylum

delivery dates drive the
experience

BDUF & waterfall

btw, agile didn’t fix it
agile has been a big step in the right direction

but is an engineering discipline

doesn’t address the full life cycle

agile has become big business and sometimes
collapses under the weight of “ceremonies” (process)

but agile is a good “engine” for delivery if you know
what to roughly build

needs a brain...

an epiphany
engineering for the experience

netflix way
customer is OOB

get code OOB as fast as
possible

customer metrics drive
everything

think it (quickly). build it.
ship it. tweak it

fail fast. learn fast.

the epiphany...

design for
experimentation
the ui layer is an
experimentation layer
four
change is the norm different PS3
experiences
experimentation is not a one launched
on same day
time event

paypal circa 2011

roll your own. disconnected
delivery experience. culture
of long shelf life. inward
focus. risk averse.

new dna
inserted
jan 2012
ﬂeshed out ui layer that
could support rapid
experimentation

march 2012
david Marcus becomes
president of PayPal

april 2012
formed lean ux team to
reinvent checkout experience

two principles
applying lean ux & engineering at paypal

#1 engineer for experimentation

experiences must learn
All buildings are predictions.
All predictions are wrong.

There's no escape from this grim
syllogism, but it can be softened.

Stewart Brand

Our software is always
tearing itself apart (or
should be)

Recognize that
different layers change
at different velocities

engineer for lean ux
Lean UX - co-located

Product/Design team UIEs Usability/Customers

And back
again...
Whiteboard Code to
to code Usability

engineering stack should
treat prototype & production the same
allow rapid sketch to code life cycle
allow quick changes during usability studies (RITE)
support being the “living spec”

stack circa 2011/early 2012
prototyping restricted
capabilities*
was hard client
server
server side
“ui bits” components** simple change could
could only take minutes to see
live here jsp***
follows an “enterprise
application” model. ui
java gets built into the “app”

* assumed client developers were low-skill
* required server side java eng for simple client changes
** java server pages. server-side java templating solution

allowed us to refactor
ui portability to get to the new stack
(backward compatibility)
dustjs dustjs
(js templating (js templating)
client
server
dustjs dustjs
(js templating) (js templating) JS templating can be
run on the client or
run on the server
node.js java
js templating can be
prototype production run on nodejs stack or
stack stack run on java stack
(rhinoscript)

enable a brain for agile

usability usability usability usability usabili

lean ux - lean team track (prototyping)

{
user interface engineering - agile scrum team (production)

agile

sprint 0 engineering - agile scrum team

release release release release

#2 engineer with open source mindset

work in open source model
internal github revolutionized
our internal development

rapidly replaced centralized
platform teams

innovation democratized

every developer encouraged
to experiment and generate repos
to share as well as to fork/pull request

give back to open source
we have a projects that we will open source
node bootstrap (similar to yeoman)

we are contributing back to open source
contributions to bootstrap (for accessibility)
contributions to bootstrap (for internationalization)
core committer on dustjs project

using github for continuous *
use github for continuous integration

starting to use github repo model for continuous
deployment
marketing pages
product pages
content updates & triggers into i18n, l10n, adaptation
components

summary
to support collaboration, shared understanding and
continuous customer feedback we changed:

technology. but not for tech sake. we did it for the
experience to support LS principles.

process. enabled lean ux and put a brain on agile.

people. revitalized our existing talent and started
attracting new talent.

blogs
http://looksgoodworkswell.com
http://designingwebinterfaces.com

twitter
follow me on twitter @billwscott

book

designing web interfaces
O’Reilly

picture credits
http://www.flickr.com/photos/paolomargari/3793121065/sizes/z/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/smb_flickr/439040132/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/juanpol/16287486/sizes/z/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/giesenbauer/4092794246/sizes/l/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/therevsteve/3104267109/sizes/o/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/not_wise/182849352/sizes/l/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/37217398@N02/3442676067/sizes/l/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hongiiv/4151964823/sizes/z/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/therevsteve/3104267109/sizes/o/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mbiskoping/6075387388/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/soldiersmediacenter/4685688778/sizes/z/

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